Next Big Idea Transcripts: Susan Cain & Paul Bloom

Listen to Susan Cain's conversation with Paul Bloom on Apple Podcasts or Spotify .

Susan Cain: Hi everybody. I am Susan Cain with The Next Big Idea Club, and I'm so excited to be here today with a great Paul Bloom, who is the author of many, many books. Including his latest, which is our latest Next Big Idea Club pick. And it is called The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. So, welcome Paul.

Paul Bloom: Hi, Susan. It's just totally wonderful to get to talk with you again.

Susan Cain: So, just for like a little bit of background for our listeners, I have been your huge fan for, I don't know how many years. I feel like it's been at least a decade maybe. But we only recently got a chance to meet. But we have a mutual friend, Annie Murphy Paul, very dear friend, whose book by the way, The Extended Mind is also an NBIC pick. And I remember sitting with Annie at an outdoor cafe a few years ago. I think it was not long before COVID. And I remember her telling me about this book that you were writing and I was so intrigued by it. And also because I had been your fan for so long, I was intrigued that we were thinking about very similar topics, I think from different points of view. But I was just struck by that and excited by that. So, it is great to be here with you today.

Paul Bloom: This all shows that you're a better person than I am because I had a conversation with the same friend and she told me, as I was talking, [inaudible 00:09:10], "My pal, Susan Cain is writing book very much in the same topic." And I'm like, "Oh no. Holy cow. Are our books going to come up the same time and everything." But then we talked and I saw we're approaching them from different ways and we're coming at it different times. But I think there's a really nice synergy between your project and mine and be good to kind of talk about how they connect in different ways.

Susan Cain: Absolutely. And by the way, I totally had that aspect of the reaction too. So, I think that's just natural writer life.

Paul Bloom: I also wrestled with the title of my book. It was almost bittersweet. But yeah, we're interested in very much the same sort of issues and the same sort of puzzles.

Susan Cain: Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think, well, I don't know. I mean, you tell us, it feels to me reading your book as if you started off wondering about these questions of why we should be drawn to supposedly unpleasant experiences, whether it's horror movies or sad songs or whatever it is. But I feel like your book actually ends up becoming a real instruction guide and meditation on the nature of happiness and meaning.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. I don't know if this happens with you, but the book is somewhat unrecognizable from the proposals. The book started off, I was going to call it the pleasures of suffering. And it was going to be about why do we willingly do things like spicy foods and hot mass, scary movies, BDSM. And why do we seemly take pleasure in suffering? And I was going to explore the psychology of it. But as I began to do that, I became interested in suffering more broadly. And I became interested in human motivation more broadly. And in the end, the book is, it's a lot of things. But it's an argument for, and I didn't expect to get there, but an argument for what I could call motivational pluralism. Which is that we don't just want pleasure, we want other things too. We want to be good. We want to have meaningful life, want to have purpose. We want to have a range of different experiences. So, we want different things and suffering could be a root to getting many of these things.

Susan Cain: If you had to encapsulate the book like in one thesis statement, would you say it's about motivational pluralism?

Paul Bloom: Yeah. I guess, one thesis statement is the book is about why we choose suffering and how suffering can add to pleasure, but also it's part and parcel to what we value the most.

Susan Cain: Right.

Paul Bloom: And some of the suffering we choose isn't about pleasure at all. It's about deeper pursuits, deeper things we want.

Susan Cain: You talk about negative emotions not necessarily being unpleasant, which sounds like a paradox because if they're negative, then by definition, they would seem to be unpleasant. So, can you tell us more about what you mean?

Paul Bloom: Yeah. So, one way to approach the issue is through David Hume and this famous paradox of tragedy. Which is, and he says like, why do we sometimes, and he's interested in like fictional experiences like books or plays. Why do we sometimes go through sorrow and terror and anxiety, even though those things are inherently unpleasant. And it's an enormous puzzle and people have wrestled with it since. And one response to this is these feeling, although typically negative are not in themselves bad. And sometimes we can take pleasure from them. Sometimes we can get insight from them. Sometimes they are unpleasant, but we could revel in them nonetheless. One way to think about this is fear. So, imagine a case where you're really afraid. Like, I don't know, it's the middle of night, you hear heavy footsteps and people running towards you. It's very scary. That's unpleasant. But what makes it unpleasant?

I think what makes it unpleasant is that the situation which is frightening to you, a situation could involve injury or death or something like that. Imagine you could feel fear in a case where there's no real threat to you. You're fantasizing, you're dreaming you're in a haunted house. You're watching a scary movie. Now it takes on a different texture. You say, I love being afraid. I want to be afraid. I'm came here to be afraid. And I think so too with emotions like anger, which typically is a response to unfairness and injustice, but you could kind of get a kick out of being angry. And connecting to your own work issues of sorrow, of some of emotional pain. Does that fit your own perspective on things?

Susan Cain: I guess, yes and no for me. To me the experience of sorrow and bittersweet and why do we like sad songs and the paradox of tragedy as it's applied to sorrow, to me that's a very different question from other kinds of negative emotions like fear or anger and so on. Yeah. And I don't want to derail it and go into like a whole different-

Paul Bloom: We have the hour we could go wherever we want. You won't even pay. So, why do you think sorrow is special?

Susan Cain: I think sorrow is special because I see sadness as being one of the fundamental pathways that we have to human connection. And that it also has to do with spiritual longing. That's why I see it as something that's different from those other kinds of emotions. So, I see sorrow as tapping into almost a kind of evolutionary impulse that we have for the mother to respond or the parent to respond to a crying child.

And that's kind of the roots of our ability to respond to each other. In general, and I think that when we hear sad music and when we see something beautiful and have that experience of our eyes welling up with tears at the site of what we think of as an almost unbearable kind of beauty. That the reason that we're crying is because I think it comes out of a sense of spiritual longing for a world that is more perfect, more loving, more beautiful than the one that we live in now. And it's like the gap between the world we long for and the world that we actually have that is triggered by that beauty and it's triggered by sad music.

Paul Bloom: So, you would say unlike emotions, like fear and anger, which show up in different forms and other species, the sorrow you're talking about sounds uniquely human.

Susan Cain: Yeah. Or that, I don't know if it's uniquely human or not actually, because all mammals, I would say are primed to respond to the cries of their infants and probably their affiliative tendencies that you see like in elephants who will care for each other and so on. I think that also comes from sorrow. So, it's not that I see sorrow as uniquely human. I think it's more that I see sorrow as a unique emotion, as opposed to like all the other negative emotions.

Paul Bloom: That's so interesting. There's a book I'll recommend if you haven't read it already. It's by James Elkins, who's an art critic, called Pictures and Tears. He asked people to send him letters about paintings that made them cry. Some of the feelings as exactly as you described it, people so moved by the beauty that they just start to weep.

Susan Cain: Yeah. And you wrote about that book in your book. And I thought to myself, how did I now come across this in all my years of research, this book looks so interesting.

Paul Bloom: Sometimes it's kind of a very funny book. It describes a woman going to Florence and going to Sistine Chapel and weeping because it's so disappointing.

Susan Cain: Oh, she's weeping with disappointment.

Paul Bloom: Too many people and it smells bad. And the book has its twists. But it's a lovely book on the sort of emotional depth of what's associated with feelings like sorrow.

Susan Cain: Well, tell us about the contrast theory of happiness that you talk about.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. So, sometimes suffering's part of fun. And then you can ask, why do we have hot baths and saunas and spicy foods and everything. What's going on in those sort of low level experiences. And I think for each one of them, there's a lot to be said. But one thing is simple contrast. So, the brain is a different engine. Experiences are not typically thought of in terms of absolutes, but their relative to what we've thought of before, relative to our expectations and relative to what we're feeling. So, going without food for a while makes food taste better. Eating spicy food and having your mouth burn sets the stage up for drinking some cool beer and immediate relief. You're not going to get that kind of relief without the pain to begin with. I gave a talk in Finland a few years ago and my host took me to as sauna and the classic Finnish sauna.

So, you're in there, you're broiling, you're just broiling and it feels awful. But it's built so you just hop right out into a lake and it is blissful. It is mind-blowingly blissful. And then when you're done broil, lake, broil, lake, broil, lake, you go and then you sitting in a bathrobe and attractive people give you beer and sausages. And it's just bliss. And so some of it is you play with pain in order to give you subsequent pleasure. And there's a deep evolutionary story here. There's a deep motive. It's kind of a hack people use.

Susan Cain: What do you mean a hack? What are we hacking when we do that?

Paul Bloom: I don't think we've evolved to do this. I don't think other creatures impose pain upon themselves to get subsequent pleasure. I don't think there's an adaptive advantage to this. I don't think it has any much depth to it. I think it's just people figured out that sometimes you cause yourself pain in the right circumstances and then when it stops, it feels great. So, great that it overwhelms the suffering of the pain in the first place.

Susan Cain: You know what I thought about when I read this in your book, I sometimes have the most ridiculous reaction to hearing about very excruciating things like I'll hear about, let's say, somebody who's been taken hostage and then they're released from being taken hostage. And I experience sometimes a moment of, I think it's envy or something like it, for the moment of pleasure that I imagine they're experiencing at the time of the release. And I've always thought it's just the craziest reaction. It's not envy exactly. It's like, oh, I would love to be having that sensation of the utter bliss they must be having at this moment. And then my rational brain will kick in and say, well it's obviously not worth all the trauma that came before. And all of that is true. But I'm just saying, this is like my first order of reaction to hearing about it. Does that make sense to you?

Paul Bloom: If you think about it, the bad is more bad than the good is good in life, potentially at least. So, the sad thing is you think of all the things that could happen to you later on in the day that are positive and none of them are as positive as the bad things that could happen to you later in the day, which include dying. Which is really bad from an evolutionary point of view and from a personal point of view too. So, maybe it follows from this, that the release from badness you've escaped, you don't have cancer, your child is alive is so powerful that it's kind of hard to beat with more everyday positive experiences. But that feeling is a perfect example. I'm interested in chosen suffering and when we choose and when we orchestrate things. And you're talking about something different here, but it's a perfect example of the power of contrast and what it could do for us.

Susan Cain: Yeah. And how it exists on such a spectrum. My son was just talking about this the other day, he's 12 and he came home from soccer practice and he was totally exhausted. And he laid down on the bed. We were getting ready to watch a TV show. And he was like, "Oh, this is just the greatest feeling in the world after even going flat out and now I just get to lie still." I think we probably have that experience all the time. And we don't even think to savor it as much as we should.

Paul Bloom: I remember when I was a kid in Montreal shoveling snow and I'd be shoveling snow for a long time. And then my mom would make me some hot cocoa and then I'd have like a bath and it just felt so good. And you don't get that thing without the bad things before that. I think often psychologists tend to not treat fiction and fictional pleasures with the sort of respect for the complexity that these things deserve. But nonetheless, there are these big studies that take all of the plot from all the stories have hundreds of thousands of crunch them together into a computer. And what they find is one very dominant thing is things get bad and bad and bad, bad, bad, bad, then they get better again. And I think that's sort of the two hour version of what you're talking about. Which is, I think they call it man in a hole as one of the basic plots. Man falls in a hole.

Susan Cain: Oh, interesting.

Paul Bloom: He's stuck in a hole tries to get out, stuck. Then he gets out, he say, "Oh, what a great movie."

Susan Cain: Right. And at first he thinks he's going to get out. And then he can't. And then he finally does. Yeah.

Paul Bloom: They're surrounding of obstacles. And it's interesting that for reasons which are kind of cool, it has to have that sort of a temporal contour. Time has to work that way. And there's, Danny Kahneman, who's the guru of positive psychology, Nobel Prize winner and brilliant scholar, points out when we think about experiences endings matter tremendously.

Susan Cain: Right.

Paul Bloom: And endings matter so much more than the beginnings. And it just fits common sense.

Susan Cain: I wonder if there's a cultural dimension to that. Because I feel like what you're describing is the way an American or Hollywood movie narrative would need to go. But many European movies would be much more like, well, let's just explore what life really is.

Paul Bloom: Yes.

Susan Cain: And it might not end on the happiest note. It might end on a minor keynote. And there's something that we get from that too.

Paul Bloom: I think the way to figure out people's natural preferences, isn't to look at fancy movies or art films. It's to look at what do most Europeans watch? What do most Asians watch, most Africans watch? How do children's stories work? How do superhero movies work? But once you have a pattern, what happens, the first thing there's many different things you might want out of a fiction. Pleasures in all of it. But also once you have a pattern, people will then work to subvert it. So, there's some very clever movies that set you up for a happy ending then take it away. And one of the pleasures of that is the pleasure of surprise of delight.

Susan Cain: Right. Right. So, how do you account for the fact that some people are drawn to different kinds of negative experiences? Like last time we talked, I think we talked about the phenomenon of horror movies and I told you like, to me, I cannot imagine why anybody watches horror movies. And yet obviously millions of people do. And that's why this whole genre exists. And yet I love sad songs. So, like I love spicy food. So, what are the differences? Why do we go in one direction and not another?

Paul Bloom: That's an easy one. Nobody knows. Because there are these lists, Paul Rosen who studied a lot of this, has these lists of unpleasant activities. You ask people how would he to think of horror movies? What do you think of a painful massage? What do you think of spicy foods? The list goes on and on. And everybody has their own poison. Everybody has their sort of suffering that they enjoy and that they don't. And as best I know, there's no personality measure, individual differences measure, no answer to that question yet. Even horror movies, you might think that, oh, there's a sex difference. Men like them more than women. But when the studies have been done, the sex difference is real. But it's really small. A lot of women like to be scared. A lot of men don't.

Susan Cain: I would think with horror movies, I may have said this last time. I can't remember now. I would've thought there would be some correlation with sensation seekers. Did you see anything like that?

Paul Bloom: Yeah.

Susan Cain: And just to define it for people sensation seeking, it's a preference for having extreme forms of experience.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. Sensation seeking is predictive overall of wanting to seek out these painful experiences. But the problem is sensation seeking is typically almost defined in terms of a series of questions that ask you, do you enjoy aversive experiences? So, it's a typical psychologist trick of saying my scale predicts mountain climbing perfectly. And then you look at the scale and the scale includes, do you like to mountain climb? And so sensation, it is almost asking question in a different way. But if I do the sort of standard psychological measures, how old are you? What's your gender? Are you conscientious, extroverted, open-minded? What you did along. You don't get much prediction. I've heard the claim made, and actually I'm hoping to investigate this. That in societies where life is harder, a lot more poverty, people living more day to day, a lot more struggle. There may be less seeking out of unpleasant experiences. Maybe because people have their fill in everyday life. It might be the hunter gatherers don't engage in BDSM for instance. But I just don't know. It's just a hypothesis at this point.

Susan Cain: That's an interesting idea. You did talk about how in cultures that face more difficulties, there's a greater sense of meaning.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. I mean, this gets us back to pluralism. So, if you look at the happiest countries in the world, they're the richest countries in the world. It's a very powerful correlation. There are also countries that have a lot of individual freedom where people trust to each other, where there's a good social safety net. There are Denmark, Finland, Australia, Canada, where I'm now at. The US is pretty good, but less for different reasons not as happy as they should be. Basically prosperity gives you happiness. And just like within a country, richer people are happier than poorer people. Because money buys all sorts of things that are related to happiness. But then you ask people a different question and there must be a dozen surveys, constantly ask people how happy they are.

But Gallup did something many years ago that they had never done, where he said, "How much meaning and purpose does your life have?" And therein is a perfect inversion where it's the poorest countries and the ones that are most dangerous with the least social support and the less freedom and more worries about war and disease and poverty people claim to have the most meaning in their lives. Scientists have wrestled over why people in such countries are more religious. Maybe that causes it. They tend to have more children, maybe that's related. But I think one answer maybe on top of those is that what everyone says of a day to day struggle. I prefer prosperity for everybody. But what everybody says about day to day struggle, you don't feel useless. You feel that there's a purpose in meaning. If your work is how your family survives and how your world goes on, it's going to feel meaningful.

Well, if you're fairly affluent and you're doing a job that's, I think David Graeber has this term "bullshit jobs" where they're jobs, which don't add anything to the world. They're just shuffling around papers or doing something, dispensable jobs. There's a feeling of [inaudible 00:27:20] and lack of meaning. And I think we get a lot of those in a society like ours. You get the same thing by the way, for jobs themselves. You ask people, what do you do for a living and how much meaning do you find in it? And the jobs that are on the top aren't necessarily high paying or high status they're jobs like being a member to clergy, being in the military, a social worker, a teacher. Jobs that are difficult, but make a difference in people's lives are counted as high meaning. Well, I forget the data, but I don't think hedge fund manager is going to get it very high for meaning.

Susan Cain: Yeah, no. I mean, that makes perfect sense to me. Because you could say one definition of meaning or maybe the definition of meaning in life is the ability to do something for someone else to make someone's life better or to take away someone else's pain. So, it would sense that in countries facing more struggles, that's something that you're doing all the time. Whereas in a situation of prosperity, you might have to look for situations in which you can do that. It's almost analogous to the way you have to force yourself to go to the gym to exercise instead of exercising just being part of how hunt your food.

Paul Bloom: That's a great analogy. I think right now in a world that we live in, we need to seek it out. I think there's other ways to seek out, I mean like people climb mountains for instance, and they do all sorts of things. But yeah, we might be more motivated to do this in unusual ways because we don't get it as just part of life as we normally live it.

Susan Cain: Okay. Climbing mountains. What do you think that's about? You give the example of climbing Everest as an example of the kind of pain people willingly seek out in ways that might seem mystifying to some people, but tell us your explanation.

Paul Bloom: It's a wonderful example of why I gave up framing the book in terms of pleasure. The economist, George Loewenstein has a wonderful paper reviewing why people mountain climb it's called Because it is There. And he talks about it. And he makes the point that mountain climbing is miserable. Like endurance, serious mountain climbing is miserable. People are continually exhausted. It's difficult to breathe. They have a headache the whole time. Frostbite is a constant risk. It's grueling. Doesn't even look that good from when you're doing it. It could be immensely boring, you'd be stuck in a tent for 24 hours waiting for a storm to go by.

People, get to the top and is it a glorious experience. And I say, oh my God, time to turn around, go back. And on every account, and you can watch documentaries like Touching the Void or Everest and you see how miserable people are. And yet they love it. They do it again and again. And so Loewenstein and me go through these different explanations for why people not just choose to suffer. They pay an enormous amount of money taking immense risk to suffer to do this. And there's different answers. I think a cynical answer for all of this is signaling, it's impressive, it impresses people, can impress yourself. But I think the real answer is for whatever reason is seen as a meaningful pursuit and we like to do meaningful and important things.

Susan Cain: Yeah. I mean I'm thinking of two different aspects of this. So, one is the contrast theory of pain that you were talking about before and maybe there really is something that will make us go through all of that just for the shear moment of bliss of reaching the top of the mountain. I also wonder if it's operating at some kind of a symbolic level where I don't know. One of the things that really happened to me through writing this book is I became much more aware of the spiritual dimensions of why we do everything, whether we're atheists or believers. It's irrelevant. So, I do wonder if there's something about this act of symbolically ascending to the heavens that is tapping into some very deep instinct that will make us, go through it. It's almost like walking to Canterbury with the stones in your shoes. It's like a kind of pilgrimage and you take on pains along the way as a way of making this pilgrimage to ascend to the place you really want to be.

Paul Bloom: Yeah. I mean, I think it's an open question, whether that's true for mountain playing, but it's certainly true for some things. A lot of the suffering we willingly endure is very much in the context of religion. All the major religions have some sort of suffering just baked in some sort of deprivation. You got to fast on this day. You got to stand up for a long time that day. And then you get the heavy duty sacrifices and self-imposed tribulations that are seen as having a spiritual context. I talk about, I have a chapter on this, just go over the different motivations you might be seen as reliving the suffering of Christ or you may be seen as in some way, paying God back for what he's done for you. What's interesting. Is that religion more so than anything else I could think of provides a rationale for unchosen suffering?

So, my book is very much why we choose to suffer. And I actually think we could talk about unchosen suffering probably. It does not have to benefit many people say it does. It's often just terrible, but we're very good storytellers. And when bad things happen to us, we're quite good at telling a story why. And often a story involves religion and religious context. There's a wonderful passage from a Pope who's, I forget which Pope it was, but he goes on to say, "A good father disciplines his children and makes his children suffer so that they learn." Well that's what happens when we suffer. And C.S. Lewis has this wonderful, I love C.S. Lewis. [crosstalk 00:32:27].

Susan Cain: Me too. He's the best.

Paul Bloom: And he has this wonderful line saying that, "When things are going well, nobody looks towards God." They say this is great. But when we're in pain, when we're suffering, all of a sudden God's voice, which was once a whisper becomes a bellow. I have to say, there's a lovely part, when I talk about the differently chosen suffering and unchosen suffering, I'd give an example of fasting. Where sometimes people choose to fast and there could be a real sense of mastery and not eating for a period. Look at me. But an unchosen suffering is you ran out of food or someone's locked you in a cage. Even that's terrible. But C.S. Lewis nicely inverts it where he's very angry at the fasters. Because then when you fast, too many people get caught up in their own pride. They don't look towards God. They say, look what a special person I am. Look at my powers. And what somebody like me sees as a positive thing he sees as name negative thing.

Susan Cain: Because he's seeing it as a kind of like grand virtue signaling or something.

Paul Bloom: Yes, yes. There's a reason why the seven deadly sins pride supposed to be the worst one.

Susan Cain: Right, right, right, right.

Paul Bloom: I think it's because you say, look at me and not look at God.

Susan Cain: The thing you just said about the stories that we construct to explain our situations. I'm curious to ask you what you think about this. In my book, I spent a lot of time talking to people who are really involved with a quest to extend human lifespan possibly forever. And I interviewed one of those scientists. He said something like, "Because we for so long have believed that it is absolutely impossible to defy death." According to him, we tell ourselves these stories about how death gives meaning to life and so on. But that's only a story that we've told ourselves out of necessity. And if we didn't have that necessity, the story would go away. I'm not sure I agree with that. I have all kinds of thoughts about that. But I'm curious how you see that in the context of everything you've been looking at in this book.

Paul Bloom: Oh, so I never thought of that. I think he's right and he is wrong. I think he's right in that people do when faced with the fact that roughly 70, 80, 90 years of things go well, we often tell a story that's just right. Oh, to live longer, would be horrible. Somebody would go wrong. There's sort of a fundamental conservatism in our thinking there, which is to take this terrible inevitability and tell a nice story about it. That it's just as planned. And I think that's foolish. I think if somebody offered me a pill that would give me another 50 years of happy life, of course I would take it. And that'll make a story for why 120 years is the best number of years.

Susan Cain: That's what I was going to say. Okay, 50. So, what about a 100? What about 300?

Paul Bloom: So, here's where I disagree with him, which is a long life is a great life. Maybe the longer, the better. But I think, and this is me parroting back arguments by philosophers. But I think that they're right, is that I think a sense of some degree of finitude, some degree of that it doesn't go forever is necessary for life's projects. Without it, there would be not even a sort of tinge of any urgency. You could put off anything indefinitely. And I think a life needs to have an ending in order for, as you're participating in it for you to go forward with it.

Susan Cain: That's funny that you cite the philosophers and that point of view, because when I was at this conference interviewing this scientist, I texted a friend of mine, Raffaella De Rosa. She's a philosophy professor. And I was telling her about these ideas and she was texting me back and saying, "That's crazy. What about [Hidacure 00:35:54]? You won't want to get anything done without that kind of urgency."

Paul Bloom: It was a wonderful song. I forget. This is better than any philosophy, a wonderful song. Something like While we were Vampires.

(singing)

And it's about vampires talking about eternal life. And the claim is that love, real love requires some degree of aging, requires some idea that there could be an ending.

(singing)

What do you think, you sided to philosophers here?

Susan Cain: I don't know. I mean, I'm really torn with this particular one. I do think that the people who make this kind of argument in favor of living forever, I've also heard them say things like if we can solve this problem of mortality, then we can solve any problem. Including the problem of scarcity and conflict and everything. And I really don't see it that way at all. And I think that the fact of our shared mortality is actually one of the greatest hopes that we have for being able to truly love and understand each other. Because it's like a kind of fundamental, deep knowledge of we're in this together.

This crazy mystery of life and death. And then on the other hand, there was another one of these guys who I talked to and he did this thought experiment with me where he said, "Okay, imagine that you had the ability to press the button to say, when you're going to go. Would you press it for tomorrow?" And of course the answer is no. "Well, would you press it for the next day?" No. "Would you press it for next year?" No. And it becomes impossible to figure out when is the day that you would actually press that button. I guess you could say what's wrong with that thought experiment is it's a case where you have the agency. Whereas, so much of the mystery of death I think has to do with the fact that we have no control over it. No knowledge, no ability to predict it.

Paul Bloom: I also wonder whether if you had the button in front of you and even assume that you live forever or you live indefinitely and assume that your body stays the same, everything just works fine and everything, and there's no disease and everything. I wonder if people eventually would hit the button, would say enough is enough.

Susan Cain: I'm just too bored or I'm too ... Like, I mean, you talk in your book about how boredom is the one negative thing that we just cannot tolerate.

Paul Bloom: That's right. There's all sorts of things we willingly experience for suffering, physical deprivation and emotional pain. The list goes on and on. There are some exceptions to this, but for the most part, people don't say, here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to go sit in a room and do nothing for a few hours just to suffer boredom. It's funny. There's two things that we don't seem to want. One is boredom. The other one is nausea. I mean, certainly there's a lot of people in the world, millions and millions who would choose to die if they can. And many do as they get older. But that's confounded with all sorts of physical ailments and problems.

Susan Cain: Oh yeah. And all these people who would advocate for living forever for a radically longer time, it's always supposing that you have health and you're not [crosstalk 00:38:56].

Paul Bloom: Yes, that's right. There was a discussion I heard once. Do you think there's some things you would never ever get bored of? I heard people discuss, I think Tyler Kawan on a podcast and he said, "One of the things is like food, because you've evolved to eat." You'll never say I'm bored of eating. So, boring.

Susan Cain: That's true. And I'll give you another one. And I think music, I mean, and you can obviously get bored of listening to the same song too many times. But the experience of hearing something that you love that's fresh enough. I don't know. I don't think that would ever go away. Because I think that's the ultimate transcendent experience.

Paul Bloom: Oh, that's interesting.

Susan Cain: I really do. I think music above everything else.

Paul Bloom: From me, Wordle. But it's clever, for those who don't know, it's this word again comes out every day, but it only comes out once a day. And so the trick to not being bored is to space out your [crosstalk 00:39:48].

Susan Cain: Okay, wait. We don't have so much more time. So, I want to just ask you a few more things about your book. Let's talk about Nozick's experience machine.

Paul Bloom: Yeah.

Susan Cain: Also a thought experiment.

Paul Bloom: It's a great thought experiment. It's part of an argument against heathenism. So, Robert Nozick, brilliant libertarian philosopher says this. "Imagine there's a machine, you plug yourself into it and you lie in a bed and then it will be as if to you are living the best life possible. You were living a life of the sex and romance and love and adventure and success and so on. If you think the best life possible involves some difficulty, you'll have difficulty. You'll have risk, you'll have everything. But the very best life you would live it when I plug you into the machine. But of course you're not doing anything. You spent the rest of your life as sort of a vegetable. You're just lying there until your natural death." And Nozick says, "Nobody would want to put himself into that machine." Because people want to live a life.

They don't want to just imagine a good life. And I think this is terribly overstated because certainly if I was in a prison or if I had a terrible chronic pain, I can imagine all sorts of situation where I say plug me in man. But I think he's actually right. I've raised children. I think that's valuable. That's important. I don't want to think I raise children. I don't want the experiences of raising children. I want to actually raise children.

I want to fall in love. I want to write books. I want to do projects, I even want to fail. And I want to really do it. Not just think I did it. So, Nozick's conclusion here is to say, we don't want the experiences in them of themselves. What we want is we want to actually do these things. The experience that are valuable only in so far is they reflect actual things. And that's an argument against heathenism. I've raised this in different classes and you get different responses. Some people say, no, I'd be plugged in. And I don't know what to make of such people, but there aren't such people who say it. What about you? You wouldn't want to be plugged in.

Susan Cain: Well, I think some of this may have to do with our quest for wanting truth. Wanting things to be true. I think we can't stand the fact of, no matter how much we're enjoying the experience being told it's not real. It's not true.

Paul Bloom: That's right.

Susan Cain: I actually wonder if there's any correlation between people who tend to say yeah sign me up for the machine and their tendency to seek truth. I don't know. But I will say having said that, which makes me sound like, oh yeah, I probably would not want to sign up for the machine. But you flipped it around in the book and you said, okay, now imagine the scenario where you were in the machine to begin with. That's all you ever knew. And then somebody comes to you and says, that was all a machine. Now, do you want the truth? I have to tell, I keep asking myself that question ever since I read it. I've not been able to stop thinking about it. And I think, well, what if my kids were part of the machine? What if my husband were part of the machine. My whole life. Would I really give all that away? And what if they told you the reality that you're going to go to is considerably less pleasant. What would you do for real?

Paul Bloom: No, I know that. I think it's Felipe De Brigard, who's a philosopher. Does experiments. Gave that scenario. And you could just imagine it. You're talking to me and all of a sudden you blip out and you're in a room and some technicians are there and saying, well, you've been in a machine. Of course, when you're in a machine, you don't know you're in a machine that's the drag. Every five years, we check on you and everything. Do you want to go back? And then you say, well, I want to go back to be with my kids and my family. Those don't exist. There's no such thing. They're just a dream. But of course, if you go back, you'll be with them again in your dream. And I hear that and I think send me back. So, his claim is that we do the experiment the wrong way, where suffer from a status quo bias. And if we're in the machine, we want to stay in there.

Susan Cain: Maybe, I don't know, just listening to you thinking maybe it's not only that and a status quo bias. Maybe it's also part of our instinct to believe that fiction can be just as deep a truth as reality. Why do we read novels? It's not really because we want to be told a tall tale. It's not the only pleasure of it. It's because we feel like there's a deeper truth in there. So, if someone said your kids, your books, you're writing like all the things you love the most, they were a fiction. There could still be truth in that fiction.

Paul Bloom: I think so. And this is an answer David Chalmers would give. And he argues that if a virtual reality becomes in some way, sufficiently detailed and is indistinguishable from real world, it is real. There's a sense in which it is real and should be cherished as such. There's all these real world cases that are sort of like Nozick's case. I can't imagine. Suppose you convince me that heroin will give me tremendous bliss and I'm told it has quite those powers.

And suppose you told me more implausibly that you could hook me up to a heroin drip for the next, [inaudible 00:44:56], to live another 30 years. And I've been 30 years just in bliss. There's no way I would take that because there's people around and people depend on me. And that's what I often, people who say, oh, plug me in, man. I point out don't you have people you love. Well, you be separated from them. And the thing is, you won't know, you'll be separated from them. When you're in the machine, you won't feel bad at all. Because there they are. But of course you will be separated from them and you will cause them pain.

Susan Cain: My son went through a phase where he was reading those Ready Player One books, which are all about virtual reality.

Paul Bloom: Oh, yes.

Susan Cain: And so he asked me if I could live in that Ready Player One existence, what would I want it to look like? And I said, I want it to look like just a great cafe. Like my perfect cafe. He's like really? That's what you would choose.

Paul Bloom: You'd have a whole virtual reality thing and just kind of nice cafe drinking coffee and just washing the world go by.

Susan Cain: It's the highest pleasure. Okay. In what ways, if any, did your intuitions and conclusions change as you were researching and writing this book?

Paul Bloom: I think in some way with certain personal decisions, it's made me a bit braver.

Susan Cain: Made you braver.

Paul Bloom: I wrote the book during a sort topsy turvy point in my life. And at times I was confronted with decisions over whether to keep life as it is and good. Or to take steps that will make things harder. But in some sense better. When you think of all sorts of extravagant cases like that, even simple cases, like I don't know. Decide whether to get a pet. I don't know whether to go on a trip, whether to say yes to something complicated. I think in those cases to sometimes thinking about it, the idea of motivational pluralism, there's other things besides being happy that push me in different directions.

Susan Cain: And that makes me think of all the research that you have in the book about children and the decision to have children and all the research that's been found about how people who have children, they will say they have great meaning, but they're not necessarily happy in each given moment while they're wiping up the floor of smashed Cheerios and all those different things.

Paul Bloom: Yes. Children are a wonderful case of the conflict between different values we have. And also a great case of chosen suffering. I mean, nobody who has a kid expects it to be this easy ride. They know is going to have all these challenges and difficulties. There's a lot of psychological work. I mentioned Danny Kahneman before and he was involved in [inaudible 00:47:19] work, finding the kids just make you less happy day to day. You have a study where you get people to have an iPhone and it goes off random times. They say how happy you are. And it turns out when people are with their young kids, they're not happy. They're not enjoying it for the most part. There are a lot of literature showing up that non-parents are happier than parents. And then as often happens psychology, things got more complicated.

So, it turns out that this is particularly true for Americans, but not people in other countries. Maybe having to have childcare situations, it's having a kid is worse for women than for men. It's worse for young people than for older people. It's particularly worse for single parents. But still hedonically, if you said, all I want is to be happy. I wouldn't advise anybody to have a kid, but of course when people say having a kid was the greatest thing of my life, they're not saying I got many more [Heatons 00:48:10] from it. And they're saying, well, it's meaning it's a new relationship. It's somebody I love is in the world now and is connection. And I feel important. I feel needed. Stuff like that. And so many psychologists miss those other aspects of a good life. One way to put it is I think when people have kids and think back on having kids and value it, they're not thinking in terms of pleasure in any simple sense. It's a lot of other things that are, I think just really important.

Susan Cain: There's this ritual that I wrote about in my book and I could never figure out where it came from. I just know I read about it somewhere and I read about it long before I had children, but it really stuck with me. It's a ritual. It's performed by a tribe somewhere in this world. And this ritual is designed to prepare women for the loss of their young men at puberty. And what the women has to do every year from the time her son is born, in this tribe this is only about sons. We would think of it for daughters too. But anyway, from the time that her son born, she has to give up something precious to her. So, whether it's a bracelet or a kind of food that she loves to eat or whatever it is, and the idea is that it's supposed to prepare her for that moment of the profound, empty nest of her son turning into a man.

Paul Bloom: God. Wow.

Susan Cain: I know.

Paul Bloom: It's smart. I mean, in our culture, people don't leave the house typically at puberty. My own experience of [inaudible 00:49:35] were different. I was very sad when my sons left the house. I really missed them both. But I know a lot of people who desperately loved their kids, but when it was time for them to leave, they were ready to get them out. And the teenage years were stressful enough that it made the departure easier. I'm not trying to put a curse on you.

Susan Cain: No, not at all. We're still in the sweet spot years. So, we'll see. I don't know. My kids are 12 and 14, so far so good.

Paul Bloom: Honestly the sweet spot years could last forever. The ugly teenage stereotypes of all sorts of trouble are by no means inevitable.

Susan Cain: Yes. That's what I hear. So, I have my fingers cost. But I have not been doing the giving up of iPhone or whatever I would give up if I were performing this.

Paul Bloom: Shutting down your Netflix account one day.

Susan Cain: Okay. So, I think we're going to be at a time in a minute. So, is there anything that we should have covered or a point from the book that you really would've wanted to convey that we haven't talked about?

Paul Bloom: We've been talking around your book, but I'll ask you the question you asked me then, how's writing your book changed you?

Susan Cain: Oh gosh. I guess it changed me in a way that I alluded to during our conversation, which is that all my life I've been a pretty deep agnostic and I still am. I started out the book trying to answer what I thought was a kind of narrow question yet, one that possessed me and I could not let go. And it was the question of why listening to sad or minor key music feels not just pleasurable, but incredibly elevating as close to transcendence as it gets. And I couldn't understand why that should be like, I would feel this great sense of love with anybody else who had felt the sorrow that the music was trying to convey. And what was that? And in trying to answer this question, it actually really led me down a spiritual path that I hadn't really understood was embedded in the music all along.

And I'm still just as much of an agnostic as I ever or was, but I really have come to believe that the essence of being human is to long for what I call the perfect and beautiful world. And that we express that religiously. There's like the longing for Mecca, the longing Zion and the longing for the beloved of the soul. We express that religiously, but we also express it in books and in music and in love. And that's at the heart of everything.

Paul Bloom: Wow.

Susan Cain: And applying that to your field of psychology, if I were a psychology researcher, I've started to think that because most psychology researchers tend to be atheist or agnostic. I don't think that we've been thinking about spirituality in the right way. The way I've seen it discussed it's like here's positive psychology. Here's a list of 24 great character traits that you might have.

One of those is spirituality. And that makes it sound as if there's few people or some people for whom spirituality is this thing that they do. And that's great. And if there's all this research showing that it makes them happy and loving and all these things, but it's just like a personality trait or something like that. Instead of looking at it as the true essence of who we are and studying it from that point of view. So, that was a huge and radical change for me because I did not expect it. I wasn't looking for it, but that's where I went.

Paul Bloom: That sounds extraordinary. I'm very curious whether the book will evoke a similar response in your readers, including me.

Susan Cain: Yeah. It'll be interesting to see.

Paul Bloom: Great.

Susan Cain: Okay. Well, thank you so, so much for this amazing conversation. I know we said this last time, but I really hope we get to do it in person before long.

Paul Bloom: Yes. Same. It's always a pleasure.

Susan Cain: Always a pleasure. And thank you so much for sharing this book with us. And I know I said I had asked the last question, but I just want to ask you one more, which is what's your next book? If you're ready to say.

Paul Bloom: I'm not far from being finished a draft of. It's a very different kind of book. It's a book just talks all about psychology. It's not a textbook, but it's an accessible introduction to the field of psychology. If somebody wants to know the science of psychology, everything from the brain to positive psychology, to neurosis to everything, this is what the book is for.

Susan Cain: Oh my gosh. That's like a history of everything kind of book.

Paul Bloom: And man, it was much harder to write than I thought it would be.

Susan Cain: I can imagine. That sounds incredibly daunting and I can't wait to read it.

Paul Bloom: Well, thank you.

Susan Cain: Okay. Well, thank you so much, Paul. And have a wonderful day.

Paul Bloom: Thank you.